Opis ebooka Fanny Herself - Edna Ferber

This intensely personal chronicle of a young girl growing up Jewish in a small midwestern town is the most autobiographical of Pulitzer Prize-winning Ferber’s novels, full of fine, full-blown, and fascinating characters.

Opinie o ebooku Fanny Herself - Edna Ferber

Fragment ebooka Fanny Herself - Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber (15 August 1885 - 16 April 1968), was an American
novelist, author and playwright. Ferber's novels generally featured
strong female protagonists, although she fleshed out multiple
characters in each book. She usually highlighted at least one
strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or
for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her
belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty persons
have the best character. Due to her imagination in scene,
characterization and plot, several theatrical and film productions
have been made based on her works, including Show Boat, Giant,
Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron (which won an Oscar) and the 1960 remake.
Two of these works - Show Boat and Saratoga Trunk - were developed
into musicals. When composer Jerome Kern proposed turning the very
serious Show Boat into a musical, Ferber was shocked, thinking it
would be transformed into a typical light entertainment of the
1920s, and it was not until Kern explained that he and Oscar
Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that
Ferber granted him the rights. Saratoga (musical) was written at a
much later date, after serious plots had become acceptable in stage
musicals. In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book So Big,
which was made into a silent film starring Colleen Moore that same
year. An early talkie movie remake followed, in 1932, starring
Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent, with Bette Davis in a supporting
role. It was the only movie Stanwyck and Davis ever appeared in
together, and Stanwyck played Davis' mother-in-law, although only a
year older in real life, which allegedly displeased her, as did the
attitude of the hoydenish Davis. A 1953 remake of So Big starred
Jane Wyman in the Stanwyck role, and is the version most often seen
today. Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of
wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New
York. Ferber and another member of the Round Table, Alexander
Woollcott, were long-time enemies, their antipathy lasting until
Woollcott's death in 1943, although Howard Teichmann states in his
biography of Woollcott that this was due to a misunderstanding.
According to Teichmann, Ferber once described Woollcott as "a New
Jersey Nero who has mistaken his pinafore for a toga." Ferber was
portrayed by Lili Taylor in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. In
2002 in her hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, the U.S. Postal
Service issued an 83-cent commemorative stamp as part of the
"Distinguished Americans" series. Artist Mark Summers, well known
for his scratchboard technique, created this portrait for the stamp
referencing a black-and-white photograph of Ferber taken in 1927.
Source: Wikipedia

Copyright: This work was
published before 1923 and is in the public domain in the USA
only.

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TO WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

Preface

It has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their
hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. Time
was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of twenty-four,
who was presented as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve.
Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are
invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In
extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from
swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so
often English), from shorts to Etons.

The thrill we get for our pains is when, at twenty-five, he
jumps over the traces and marries the young lady we met in her
cradle on page two. The process is known as a psychological study.
A publisher's note on page five hundred and seventy-three assures
us that the author is now at work on Volume Two, dealing with the
hero's adult life. A third volume will present his pleasing
senility. The whole is known as a trilogy. If the chief character
is of the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or
hoydenish. We see her in her graduation white, in her bridal
finery. By the time she is twenty we know her better than her
mother ever will, and are infinitely more bored by her.

Yet who would exchange one page in the life of the boy, David
Copperfield, for whole chapters dealing with Trotwood Copperfield,
the man? Who would relinquish the button-bursting Peggotty for the
saintly Agnes? And that other David—he of the slingshot; one could
not love him so well in his psalm-singing days had one not known
him first as the gallant, dauntless vanquisher of giants. As for
Becky Sharp, with her treachery, her cruelty, her vindicativeness,
perhaps we could better have understood and forgiven her had we
known her lonely and neglected childhood, with the drunken artist
father and her mother, the French opera girl.

With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with Miss
Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you suffer Fanny, but
Fanny's mother as well, without whom there could be no
understanding Fanny. For that matter, we shouldn't wonder if Mrs.
Brandeis were to turn out the heroine in the end. She is that kind
of person.

Chapter1

You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being aware
of Mrs. Brandeis. In a town of ten thousand, where every one was a
personality, from Hen Cody, the drayman, in blue overalls
(magically transformed on Sunday mornings into a suave
black-broadcloth usher at the Congregational Church), to A. J.
Dawes, who owned the waterworks before the city bought it. Mrs.
Brandeis was a super-personality. Winnebago did not know it.
Winnebago, buying its dolls, and china, and Battenberg braid and
tinware and toys of Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, realized
vaguely that here was some one different.

When you entered the long, cool, narrow store on Elm Street,
Mrs. Brandeis herself came forward to serve you, unless she already
was busy with two customers. There were two clerks—three, if you
count Aloysius, the boy—but to Mrs. Brandeis belonged the privilege
of docketing you first. If you happened in during a moment of
business lull, you were likely to find her reading in the left-hand
corner at the front of the store, near the shelf where were ranged
the dolls' heads, the pens, the pencils, and school supplies.

You saw a sturdy, well-set-up, alert woman, of the kind that
looks taller than she really is; a woman with a long, straight,
clever nose that indexed her character, as did everything about
her, from her crisp, vigorous, abundant hair to the way she came
down hard on her heels in walking. She was what might be called a
very definite person. But first you remarked her eyes. Will you
concede that eyes can be piercing, yet velvety? Their piercingness
was a mental quality, I suppose, and the velvety softness a
physical one. One could only think, somehow, of wild pansies—the
brown kind. If Winnebago had taken the trouble to glance at the
title of the book she laid face down on the pencil boxes as you
entered, it would have learned that the book was one of Balzac's,
or, perhaps, Zangwill's, or Zola's. She never could overcome that
habit of snatching a chapter here and there during dull moments.
She was too tired to read when night came.

There were many times when the little Wisconsin town lay
broiling in the August sun, or locked in the January drifts, and
the main business street was as silent as that of a deserted
village. But more often she came forward to you from the rear of
the store, with bits of excelsior clinging to her black sateen
apron. You knew that she had been helping Aloysius as he unpacked a
consignment of chamber sets or a hogshead of china or glassware,
chalking each piece with the price mark as it was dug from its nest
of straw and paper.

"How do you do!" she would say. "What can I do for you?" And in
that moment she had you listed, indexed, and filed, were you a
farmer woman in a black shawl and rusty bonnet with a faded rose
bobbing grotesquely atop it, or one of the patronizing East End set
who came to Brandeis' Bazaar because Mrs. Brandeis' party favors,
for one thing, were of a variety that could be got nowhere else
this side of Chicago. If, after greeting you, Mrs. Brandeis called,
"Sadie! Stockings!" (supposing stockings were your quest), you
might know that Mrs. Brandeis had weighed you and found you
wanting.

There had always been a store—at least, ever since Fanny could
remember. She often thought how queer it would seem to have to buy
pins, or needles, or dishes, or soap, or thread. The store held all
these things, and many more. Just to glance at the bewildering
display outside gave you promise of the variety within. Winnebago
was rather ashamed of that display. It was before the day of
repression in decoration, and the two benches in front of the
windows overflowed with lamps, and water sets, and brooms, and
boilers and tinware and hampers. Once the Winnebago Courier had had
a sarcastic editorial about what they called the Oriental bazaar
(that was after the editor, Lem Davis, had bumped his shin against
a toy cart that protruded unduly), but Mrs. Brandeis changed
nothing. She knew that the farmer women who stood outside with
their husbands on busy Saturdays would not have understood
repression in display, but they did understand the tickets that
marked the wares in plain figures—this berry set, $1.59; that lamp,
$1.23. They talked it over, outside, and drifted away, and came
back, and entered, and bought.

She knew when to be old-fashioned, did Mrs. Brandeis, and when
to be modern. She had worn the first short walking skirt in
Winnebago. It cleared the ground in a day before germs were
discovered, when women's skirts trailed and flounced behind them in
a cloud of dust. One of her scandalized neighbors (Mrs. Nathan
Pereles, it was) had taken her aside to tell her that no decent
woman would dress that way.

"Next year," said Mrs. Brandeis, "when you are wearing one, I'll
remind you of that." And she did, too. She had worn shirtwaists
with a broad "Gibson" shoulder tuck, when other Winnebago women
were still encased in linings and bodices. Do not get the
impression that she stood for emancipation, or feminism, or any of
those advanced things. They had scarcely been touched on in those
days. She was just an extraordinarily alert woman, mentally and
physically, with a shrewd sense of values. Molly Brandeis never
could set a table without forgetting the spoons, or the salt, or
something, but she could add a double column of figures in her head
as fast as her eye could travel.

There she goes, running off with the story, as we were afraid
she would. Not only that, she is using up whole pages of
description when she should be giving us dialogue. Prospective
readers, running their eyes over a printed page, object to the
solid block formation of the descriptive passage. And yet it is
fascinating to weave words about her, as it is fascinating to turn
a fine diamond this way and that in the sunlight, to catch its
prismatic hues. Besides, you want to know—do you not?—how this
woman who reads Balzac should be waiting upon you in a little
general store in Winnebago, Wisconsin?

In the first place, Ferdinand Brandeis had been a dreamer, and a
potential poet, which is bad equipment for success in the business
of general merchandise. Four times, since her marriage, Molly
Brandeis had packed her household goods, bade her friends good-by,
and with her two children, Fanny and Theodore, had followed her
husband to pastures new. A heart-breaking business, that, but
broadening. She knew nothing of the art of buying and selling at
the time of her marriage, but as the years went by she learned
unconsciously the things one should not do in business, from
watching Ferdinand Brandeis do them all. She even suggested this
change and that, but to no avail. Ferdinand Brandeis was a gentle
and lovable man at home; a testy, quick-tempered one in
business.

That was because he had been miscast from the first, and yet had
played one part too long, even though unsuccessfully, ever to learn
another. He did not make friends with the genial traveling salesmen
who breezed in, slapped him on the back, offered him a cigar,
inquired after his health, opened their sample cases and flirted
with the girl clerks, all in a breath. He was a man who talked
little, listened little, learned little. He had never got the trick
of turning his money over quickly—that trick so necessary to the
success of the small-town business.

So it was that, in the year preceding Ferdinand Brandeis' death,
there came often to the store a certain grim visitor. Herman
Walthers, cashier of the First National Bank of Winnebago, was a
kindly-enough, shrewd, small-town banker, but to Ferdinand Brandeis
and his wife his visits, growing more and more frequent, typified
all that was frightful, presaged misery and despair. He would drop
in on a bright summer morning, perhaps, with a cheerful greeting.
He would stand for a moment at the front of the store, balancing
airily from toe to heel, and glancing about from shelf to bin and
back again in a large, speculative way. Then he would begin to walk
slowly and ruminatively about, his shrewd little German eyes
appraising the stock. He would hum a little absent-minded tune as
he walked, up one aisle and down the next (there were only two),
picking up a piece of china there, turning it over to look at its
stamp, holding it up to the light, tapping it a bit with his
knuckles, and putting it down carefully before going musically on
down the aisle to the water sets, the lamps, the stockings, the
hardware, the toys. And so, his hands behind his back, still
humming, out the swinging screen door and into the sunshine of Elm
Street, leaving gloom and fear behind him.

One year after Molly Brandeis took hold, Herman Walthers' visits
ceased, and in two years he used to rise to greet her from his
little cubbyhole when she came into the bank.

Which brings us to the plush photograph album. The plush
photograph album is a concrete example of what makes business
failure and success. More than that, its brief history presents a
complete characterization of Ferdinand and Molly Brandeis.

Ten years before, Ferdinand Brandeis had bought a large bill of
Christmas fancy-goods—celluloid toilette sets, leather collar
boxes, velvet glove cases. Among the lot was a photograph album in
the shape of a huge acorn done in lightning-struck plush. It was a
hideous thing, and expensive. It stood on a brass stand, and its
leaves were edged in gilt, and its color was a nauseous green and
blue, and it was altogether the sort of thing to grace the chill
and funereal best room in a Wisconsin farmhouse. Ferdinand Brandeis
marked it at six dollars and stood it up for the Christmas trade.
That had been ten years before. It was too expensive; or too
pretentious, or perhaps even too horrible for the bucolic purse. At
any rate, it had been taken out, brushed, dusted, and placed on its
stand every holiday season for ten years. On the day after
Christmas it was always there, its lightning-struck plush face
staring wildly out upon the ravaged fancy-goods counter. It would
be packed in its box again and consigned to its long summer's
sleep. It had seen three towns, and many changes. The four dollars
that Ferdinand Brandeis had invested in it still remained
unturned.

One snowy day in November (Ferdinand Brandeis died a fortnight
later) Mrs. Brandeis, entering the store, saw two women standing at
the fancy-goods counter, laughing in a stifled sort of way. One of
them was bowing elaborately to a person unseen. Mrs. Brandeis was
puzzled. She watched them for a moment, interested. One of the
women was known to her. She came up to them and put her question,
bluntly, though her quick wits had already given her a suspicion of
the truth.

"What are you bowing to?"

The one who had done the bowing blushed a little, but giggled
too, as she said, "I'm greeting my old friend, the plush album.
I've seen it here every Christmas for five years."

Ferdinand Brandeis died suddenly a little more than a week
later. It was a terrible period, and one that might have prostrated
a less resolute and balanced woman. There were long-standing debts,
not to speak of the entire stock of holiday goods to be paid for.
The day after the funeral Winnebago got a shock. The Brandeis house
was besieged by condoling callers. Every member of the little
Jewish congregation of Winnebago came, of course, as they had come
before the funeral. Those who had not brought cakes, and salads,
and meats, and pies, brought them now, as was the invariable custom
in time of mourning.

Others of the townspeople called, too; men and women who had
known and respected Ferdinand Brandeis. And the shock they got was
this: Mrs. Brandeis was out. Any one could have told you that she
should have been sitting at home in a darkened room, wearing a
black gown, clasping Fanny and Theodore to her, and holding a
black-bordered handkerchief at intervals to her reddened eyes. And
that is what she really wanted to do, for she had loved her
husband, and she respected the conventions. What she did was to put
on a white shirtwaist and a black skirt at seven o'clock the
morning after the funeral.

The store had been closed the day before. She entered it at
seven forty-five, as Aloysius was sweeping out with wet sawdust and
a languid broom. The extra force of holiday clerks straggled in,
uncertainly, at eight or after, expecting an hour or two of
undisciplined gossip. At eight-ten Molly Brandeis walked briskly up
to the plush photograph album, whisked off its six-dollar price
mark, and stuck in its place a neatly printed card bearing these
figures: "To-day—79@!" The plush album went home in a farmer's
wagon that afternoon.

Chapter2

Right here there should be something said about Fanny Brandeis.
And yet, each time I turn to her I find her mother plucking at my
sleeve. There comes to my mind the picture of Mrs. Brandeis turning
down Norris Street at quarter to eight every morning, her walk
almost a march, so firm and measured it was, her head high, her
chin thrust forward a little, as a fighter walks, but not
pugnaciously; her short gray skirt clearing the ground, her
shoulders almost consciously squared. Other Winnebago women were
just tying up their daughters' pigtails for school, or sweeping the
front porch, or watering the hanging baskets. Norris Street
residents got into the habit of timing themselves by Mrs. Brandeis.
When she marched by at seven forty-five they hurried a little with
the tying of the hair bow, as they glanced out of the window. When
she came by again, a little before twelve, for her hasty dinner,
they turned up the fire under the potatoes and stirred the flour
thickening for the gravy.

Mrs. Brandeis had soon learned that Fanny and Theodore could
manage their own school toilettes, with, perhaps, some speeding up
on the part of Mattie, the servant girl. But it needed her keen
brown eye to detect corners that Aloysius had neglected to sweep
out with wet sawdust, and her presence to make sure that the
counter covers were taken off and folded, the outside show dusted
and arranged, the windows washed, the whole store shining and ready
for business by eight o'clock. So Fanny had even learned to do her
own tight, shiny, black, shoulder-length curls, which she tied back
with a black bow. They were wet, meek, and tractable curls at eight
in the morning. By the time school was out at four they were as
wildly unruly as if charged with electric currents—which they
really were, when you consider the little dynamo that wore
them.

Mrs. Brandeis took a scant half hour to walk the six blocks
between the store and the house, to snatch a hurried dinner, and
traverse the distance to the store again. It was a program that
would have killed a woman less magnificently healthy and
determined. She seemed to thrive on it, and she kept her figure and
her wit when other women of her age grew dull, and heavy, and
ineffectual. On summer days the little town often lay shimmering in
the heat, the yellow road glaring in it, the red bricks of the high
school reflecting it in waves, the very pine knots in the sidewalks
gummy and resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent smell that
was of the woods, and yet stifling. She must have felt an almost
irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the cool, shady
front porch, with its green-painted flower boxes, its hanging fern
baskets and the catalpa tree looking boskily down upon it.

But she never did. She had an almost savage energy and
determination. The unpaid debts were ever ahead of her; there were
the children to be dressed and sent to school; there was the
household to be kept up; there were Theodore's violin lessons that
must not be neglected—not after what Professor Bauer had said about
him.

You may think that undue stress is being laid upon this driving
force in her, upon this business ability. But remember that this
was fifteen years or more ago, before women had invaded the world
of business by the thousands, to take their place, side by side,
salary for salary, with men. Oh, there were plenty of women wage
earners in Winnebago, as elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school
teachers, bookkeepers. The paper mills were full of girls, and the
canning factory too. But here was a woman gently bred, untrained in
business, left widowed with two children at thirty-eight, and worse
than penniless—in debt.

And that was not all. As Ferdinand Brandeis' wife she had
occupied a certain social position in the little Jewish community
of Winnebago. True, they had never been moneyed, while the others
of her own faith in the little town were wealthy, and somewhat
purse-proud. They had carriages, most of them, with two handsome
horses, and their houses were spacious and veranda-encircled, and
set in shady lawns. When the Brandeis family came to Winnebago five
years before, these people had waited, cautiously, and
investigated, and then had called. They were of a type to be found
in every small town; prosperous, conservative, constructive
citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their city cousins,
mingling socially with their Gentile neighbors, living well,
spending their money freely, taking a vast pride in the education
of their children. But here was Molly Brandeis, a Jewess, setting
out to earn her living in business, like a man. It was a thing to
stir Congregation Emanu-el to its depths. Jewish women, they would
tell you, did not work thus. Their husbands worked for them, or
their sons, or their brothers.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Brandeis, when she heard of it. "I
seem to remember a Jewess named Ruth who was left widowed, and who
gleaned in the fields for her living, and yet the neighbors didn't
talk. For that matter, she seems to be pretty well thought of, to
this day."

But there is no denying that she lost caste among her own
people. Custom and training are difficult to overcome. But Molly
Brandeis was too deep in her own affairs to care. That Christmas
season following her husband's death was a ghastly time, and yet a
grimly wonderful one, for it applied the acid test to Molly
Brandeis and showed her up pure gold.

The first week in January she, with Sadie and Pearl, the two
clerks, and Aloysius, the boy, took inventory. It was a terrifying
thing, that process of casting up accounts. It showed with such
starkness how hideously the Brandeis ledger sagged on the wrong
side. The three women and the boy worked with a sort of dogged
cheerfulness at it, counting, marking, dusting, washing. They found
shelves full of forgotten stock, dust-covered and profitless. They
found many articles of what is known as hard stock, akin to the
plush album; glass and plated condiment casters for the dining
table, in a day when individual salts and separate vinegar cruets
were already the thing; lamps with straight wicks when round wicks
were in demand.

They scoured shelves, removed the grime of years from boxes,
washed whole battalions of chamber sets, bathed piles of plates,
and bins of cups and saucers. It was a dirty, back-breaking job,
that ruined the finger nails, tried the disposition, and caked the
throat with dust. Besides, the store was stove-heated and, near the
front door, uncomfortably cold. The women wore little shoulder
shawls pinned over their waists, for warmth, and all four,
including Aloysius, sniffled for weeks afterward. That inventory
developed a new, grim line around Mrs. Brandeis' mouth, and carved
another at the corner of each eye. After it was over she washed her
hair, steamed her face over a bowl of hot water, packed two
valises, left minute and masterful instructions with Mattie as to
the household, and with Sadie and Pearl as to the store, and was
off to Chicago on her first buying trip. She took Fanny with her,
as ballast. It was a trial at which many men would have quailed. On
the shrewdness and judgment of that buying trip depended the future
of Brandeis' Bazaar, and Mrs. Brandeis, and Fanny, and
Theodore.

Mrs. Brandeis had accompanied her husband on many of his trips
to Chicago. She had even gone with him occasionally to the
wholesale houses around La Salle Street, and Madison, and Fifth
Avenue, but she had never bought a dollar's worth herself. She saw
that he bought slowly, cautiously, and without imagination. She
made up her mind that she would buy quickly, intuitively. She knew
slightly some of the salesmen in the wholesale houses. They had
often made presents to her of a vase, a pocketbook, a handkerchief,
or some such trifle, which she accepted reluctantly, when at all.
She was thankful now for these visits. She found herself
remembering many details of them. She made up her mind, with a
canny knowingness, that there should be no presents this time, no
theater invitations, no lunches or dinners. This was business, she
told herself; more than business—it was grim war.

They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and jobbers
and wholesale men get together. Don't imagine that she came to be a
woman captain of finance. Don't think that we are to see her at the
head of a magnificent business establishment, with buyers and
department heads below her, and a private office done up in
mahogany, and stenographers and secretaries. No, she was Mrs.
Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, to the end. The bills she bought
were ridiculously small, I suppose, and the tricks she turned on
that first trip were pitiful, perhaps. But they were magnificent
too, in their way. I am even bold enough to think that she might
have made business history, that plucky woman, if she had had an
earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end, had a pack of
unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels, pulling at her
skirts.

It was only a six-hour trip to Chicago. Fanny Brandeis' eyes,
big enough at any time, were surely twice their size during the
entire journey of two hundred miles or more. They were to have
lunch on the train! They were to stop at an hotel! They were to go
to the theater! She would have lain back against the red plush seat
of the car, in a swoon of joy, if there had not been so much to see
in the car itself, and through the car window.

"We'll have something for lunch," said Mrs. Brandeis when they
were seated in the dining car, "that we never have at home, shall
we?"

"Oh, yes!" replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement.
"Something—something queer, and different, and not so very
healthy!"

They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them), and
chicken potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that doesn't prove
Mrs. Brandeis was game, I should like to know what could! They
stopped at the Windsor-Clifton, because it was quieter and less
expensive than the Palmer House, though quite as full of red plush
and walnut. Besides, she had stopped at the Palmer House with her
husband, and she knew how buyers were likely to be besieged by
eager salesmen with cards, and with tempting lines of goods spread
knowingly in the various sample-rooms.

Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly
receptive and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned
during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went
with her mother to the wholesale houses and heard and saw and,
unconsciously, remembered. When she became fatigued with the close
air of the dim showrooms, with their endless aisles piled with
every sort of ware, she would sit on a chair in some obscure
corner, watching those sleek, over-lunched, genial-looking salesmen
who were chewing their cigars somewhat wildly when Mrs. Brandeis
finished with them. Sometimes she did not accompany her mother, but
lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the morning, then
dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish chamber maid, and read
until her mother came for her at noon.

Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything she
saw had the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see much that
was beautiful and rare in her full lifetime, but she never again,
perhaps, got quite the thrill that those ugly, dim, red-carpeted,
gas-lighted hotel corridors gave her, or the grim bedroom, with its
walnut furniture and its Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicago
streets themselves, with their perilous corners (there were no
czars in blue to regulate traffic in those days), older and more
sophisticated pedestrians experienced various emotions while
negotiating the corner of State and Madison.

That buying trip lasted ten days. It was a racking business,
physically and mentally. There were the hours of tramping up one
aisle and down the other in the big wholesale lofts. But that
brought bodily fatigue only. It was the mental strain that left
Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp at the end of the day. Was she buying
wisely? Was she over-buying? What did she know about buying,
anyway? She would come back to her hotel at six, sometimes so
exhausted that the dining-room and dinner were unthinkable. At such
times they would have dinner in their room another delicious
adventure for Fanny. She would try to tempt the fagged woman on the
bed with bits of this or that from one of the many dishes that
dotted the dinner tray. But Molly Brandeis, harrowed in spirit and
numbed in body, was too spent to eat.

But that was not always the case. There was that unforgettable
night when they went to see Bernhardt the divine. Fanny spent the
entire morning following standing before the bedroom mirror, with
her hair pulled out in a wild fluff in front, her mother's old
marten-fur scarf high and choky around her neck, trying to smile
that slow, sad, poignant, tear-compelling smile; but she had to
give it up, clever mimic though she was. She only succeeded in
looking as though a pin were sticking her somewhere. Besides,
Fanny's own smile was a quick, broad, flashing grin, with a
generous glint of white teeth in it, and she always forgot about
being exquisitely wistful over it until it was too late.

I wonder if the story of the china religious figures will give a
wrong impression of Mrs. Brandeis. Perhaps not, if you will only
remember this woman's white-lipped determination to wrest a
livelihood from the world, for her children and herself. They had
been in Chicago a week, and she was buying at Bauder & Peck's.
Now, Bauder & Peck, importers, are known the world over. It is
doubtful if there is one of you who has not been supplied,
indirectly, with some imported bit of china or glassware, with
French opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New
York and Chicago showrooms of that company.

Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Brandeis, and he was
frowning because he hated to sell women. Young Bauder was being
broken into the Chicago end of the business, and he was not taking
gracefully to the process.

At the end of a long aisle, on an obscure shelf in a dim corner,
Molly Brandeis' sharp eyes espied a motley collection of dusty,
grimy china figures of the kind one sees on the mantel in the
parlor of the small-town Catholic home. Winnebago's population was
two-thirds Catholic, German and Irish, and very devout.

Mrs. Brandeis stopped short. "How much for that lot?" She
pointed to the shelf. Young Bauder's gaze followed hers, puzzled.
The figures were from five inches to a foot high, in crude,
effective blues, and gold, and crimson, and white. All the saints
were there in assorted sizes, the Pieta, the cradle in the manger.
There were probably two hundred or more of the little figures. "Oh,
those!" said young Bauder vaguely. "You don't want that stuff. Now,
about that Limoges china. As I said, I can make you a special price
on it if you carry it as an open-stock pattern. You'll find——"

"How much for the lot?" said Mrs. Brandeis, pleasantly, for the
third time.

"I really don't know. Three hundred, I should say. But——"

"I'll give you two hundred," ventured Mrs. Brandeis, her heart
in her mouth and her mouth very firm.

"Oh, come now, Mrs. Brandeis! Bauder & Peck don't do
business that way, you know. We'd really rather not sell them at
all. The things aren't worth much to us, or to you, for that
matter. But three hundred——"

And she got them. Which isn't the point of the story. The holy
figures were fine examples of foreign workmanship, their colors,
beneath the coating of dust, as brilliant and fadeless as those
found in the churches of Europe. They reached Winnebago duly,
packed in straw and paper, still dusty and shelf-worn. Mrs.
Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat on up-ended boxes at the rear of
the store, in the big barn-like room in which newly arrived goods
were unpacked. As Aloysius dived deep into the crate and brought up
figure after figure, the three women plunged them into warm and
soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour the entire school of
saints, angels, and cherubim. They came out brilliantly fresh and
rosy.

All the Irish ingenuity and artistry in Aloysius came to the
surface as he dived again and again into the great barrel and
brought up the glittering pieces.

"It'll make an elegant window," he gasped from the depths of the
hay, his lean, lengthy frame jack-knifed over the edge. "And
cheap." His shrewd wit had long ago divined the store's price mark.
"If Father Fitzpatrick steps by in the forenoon I'll bet they'll be
gone before nighttime to-morrow. You'll be letting me do the trim,
Mrs. Brandeis?"

He came back that evening to do it, and he threw his whole soul
into it, which, considering his ancestry and temperament, was very
high voltage for one small-town store window. He covered the floor
of the window with black crepe paper, and hung it in long folds,
like a curtain, against the rear wall. The gilt of the scepters,
and halos, and capes showed up dazzlingly against this background.
The scarlets, and pinks, and blues, and whites of the robes
appeared doubly bright. The whole made a picture that struck and
held you by its vividness and contrast.

Father Fitzpatrick, very tall and straight, and handsome, with
his iron-gray hair and his cheeks pink as a girl's, did step by
next morning on his way to the post-office. It was whispered that
in his youth Father Fitzpatrick had been an actor, and that he had
deserted the footlights for the altar lights because of a
disappointment. The drama's loss was the Church's gain. You should
have heard him on Sunday morning, now flaying them, now swaying
them! He still had the actor's flexible voice, vibrant, tremulous,
or strident, at will. And no amount of fasting or praying had ever
dimmed that certain something in his eye—the something which makes
the matinee idol.

Not only did he step by now; he turned, came back; stopped
before the window. Then he entered.

"Madam," he said to Mrs. Brandeis, "you'll probably save more
souls with your window display than I could in a month of hell-fire
sermons." He raised his hand. "You have the sanction of the
Church." Which was the beginning of a queer friendship between the
Roman Catholic priest and the Jewess shopkeeper that lasted as long
as Molly Brandeis lived.

By noon it seemed that the entire population of Winnebago had
turned devout. The figures, a tremendous bargain, though sold at a
high profit, seemed to melt away from the counter that held
them.

By three o'clock, "Only one to a customer!" announced Mrs.
Brandeis. By the middle of the week the window itself was ravished
of its show. By the end of the week there remained only a handful
of the duller and less desirable pieces—the minor saints, so to
speak. Saturday night Mrs. Brandeis did a little figuring on paper.
The lot had cost her two hundred dollars. She had sold for six
hundred. Two from six leaves four. Four hundred dollars! She
repeated it to herself, quietly. Her mind leaped back to the plush
photograph album, then to young Bauder and his cool contempt. And
there stole over her that warm, comfortable glow born of
reassurance and triumph. Four hundred dollars. Not much in these
days of big business. We said, you will remember, that it was a
pitiful enough little trick she turned to make it, though an honest
one. And—in the face of disapproval—a rather magnificent one too.
For it gave to Molly Brandeis that precious quality,
self-confidence, out of which is born success.